The cages had but simple catches. Here the public would have been kept at distance for there was a bronze railing which separated the displays from the visitors’ area but allowed her, or an assistant, to give illustrated talks.
Dragonflies and moths had all been trampled. Their glass display cases were shattered, their fragile wings torn to pieces.
Among the wreckage, a large praying mantis, still with its silver-headed mounting pin, waited as if for a meal. A mouse of some kind suddenly darted by it. When a python appeared, there was a little cry from Suzanne-Cecilia. Gently she gathered the snake in and let it drape about her neck and shoulders.
‘They will find nothing, Inspector. Why will they not believe me? It’s crazy this talk of my sending secret messages to London. How could I have done such a thing?’
He didn’t answer. What could he have said since they both knew it was a lie?
Herr Max had joined Boemelburg and the SS-Untersturm-fuhrer Schacht in urgent discussion. Walter was aware that Hermann had gone into the zebra house some time ago – everyone was acutely aware the bomb had yet to go off and that Hermann must still be fiddling with it.
A timer? wondered St-Cyr. Hidden tripwires among the hooves of restless beasts? Hermann knew and loved horses but would zebras respond to those same calming words, that same touch? A farmboy always. Ah merde alors, be careful, he said silently. Giselle and Oona need you and so do I.
A spider monkey flitted about. As it avoided the brutality of the searchers, it would leap from wreckage to wreckage, chattering excitedly at each new onslaught of debris, bitching, screeching as floorboards were probed and sometimes ripped up.
‘I would call it to me, Inspector,’ said Suzanne-Cecilia, the concern in her voice all too evident, ‘but must comfort Caesar. Joujou can’t stand to be near Caesar. It’s understandable.’
‘joujou’ he blurted. ‘Not the joujou from the carousel in the Pare des Buttes Chaumont?’
‘The same. Its former owner was arrested for murder, I think.’
There was a nod, the quivering of memories too painful to bear. ‘The Gestapo of the rue Lauriston and the SS of the avenue Foch were involved in that affair also.’
Was it a warning of things to come? ‘Then you’re old friends,’ she said, resigned to despair.
She stroked the python. It welcomed the warmth of her body, and when she laid it on the radiator that was beneath the windows, the thing languidly stretched out and she was again free to snatch a viper from one of the cages. ‘Please don’t,’ he begged and heard her say, ‘I will if I have to.’
The flask of nitroglycerine was delicately balanced on a board that rested loosely between two cross-beams some five metres above the tethered zebras. When Kohler finally reached it, his fingers trembled so much, he didn’t dare try to remove it.
The Gypsy had run the wire from the board to, and over, a nail high in the wall. From there, it ran down the wall but out from this by about ten centimetres and to another nail. When fully and sharply opened, the door was to suddenly have struck the wire which would have yanked the board away and allowed the flask to hit the paving stones below.
He shut his eyes and said, ‘Ah Gott im Himmel, I can’t take much more of this.’ He was all alone up in the gods and freezing under the thatch roof. Unused to being constrained, the zebras were highly nervous and yes, they had had to be tethered. Otherwise the Gypsy couldn’t have put the nitro where he had.
Gingerly Kohler lifted the flask away and when he had it tightly in hand, he began to ease himself downwards, but hooves struck the floor, hindquarters were squeezed and rubbed against the ladder. He felt the damned thing being tilted beyond control and cried out, ‘Easy, my honeys. Easy, eh?’
In unison all fourteen of them swung sharply to the right. In panic, he shoved the flask into a pocket only to think better of this as the ladder began to tilt a little more … a little more.
The book was among the references in the surgery. From where he stood, St-Cyr could see Suzanne-Cecilia in the other room. With the python draped behind her, she was like a goddess torn from the pages of Greek mythology. She was under guard, but the young Gefreiter was afraid of snakes and did not know, really, what to make of her.
She had refused to ‘witness’ the destruction of a surgery that could, if necessary, attend wounded German soldiers. ‘That bomb, messieurs,’ she had said. ‘Have you forgotten it? Please do not rip up the floorboards of what you may well need. You will find nothing, I assure you.’
Nothing … But she, too, could see him, and he knew then that she had so positioned herself not simply because of the snakes. The book had been left high on a shelf above her desk, a tragic oversight in the rush of all the things she must have had to do.
In 1893, Felix-Marie Delastelle had published La Cryptographie Nouvelle, his new system of cryptography which was, at the beginning of this war, still far superior to the Playfair system of the British. It took the Playfair square of the alphabet, which was arranged five letters by five and with the I and the J both falling in the same place, but added the numbers 1 and 5 along the top and left-hand side of the square so that co-ordinates could be assigned to each letter.
The message was then written out in plain text and broken into groups of five letters whose co-ordinates were written down vertically under each of the letters.
To encode a message, these co-ordinates were then read horizontally which gave different letters and different groups of five letters, which were then sent in Morse.
To decode a message one simply reversed the operation.
Two men were searching the text. They were being very thorough but impatient, Boemelburg having told them the Reich would have to compensate the City of Paris for the damages if nothing untoward was found.
Frantically St-Cyr looked about the surgery. One of the Waffen-SS was going through her thin stock of medicines. Another was reaching into a cabinet where surgical gauzes and bandages were kept. A bottle of disinfectant fell over. ‘Be careful, idiot!’ shouted the SS-Untersturmfuhrer Schacht.
The book remained on its shelf. If only there was some way of getting it out of sight …
When next he looked, Suzanne-Cecilia had again taken up the python. She was going to use it to distract her guard so that she could reach into one of the cages. She knew how afraid the boy was of snakes. She was letting him see her cradle the python’s head, was stroking it, was now holding it out to him as he backed away …
‘RAUS! RAUS! Get out! Get out! Clear the area! Nitro!’
Hermann had a flask in hand, Ah merde, he looked old and grey and badly shaken.
The others ran. They left the surgery. Quickly St-Cyr snatched the book from the shelf and tucked it into a pocket. Hurriedly rejoining her, he said gently, ‘Come. Please come. Leave that death adder alone, eh?’ And letting her put the python back on the radiator, took her firmly by the arm. ‘It’s not necessary you kill yourself. Not yet, but where, exactly, have you hidden it?’
‘Hidden what, please?’ she asked with complete candour. ‘My life is an open book, Inspector, as you can well see.’
Outside the Laboratory of Physiology, Hermann was putting the flask into the Untersturmfuhrer’s hands. None of the others had stayed around.
8
At 6 p.m. the distant tolling of the Bibliotheque Nationale’s bell thudded on the cold, hard air in darkness. Strains of Greta Keller singing ‘Eine Kleine Reise’ – ‘Just a Little Ramble’ – filtered out on to the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honore. A staff car drew up. A quiet, ‘Later, Friedrich. An hour,’ was given, and the car, like a wraith, pulled softly away and into the velo-crowded, pedestrian-filled night.